drained

Standard

I feel drained.

There’s the deadline. The extension to the deadline. The paper. The second paper. The paper you are writing in parallel to the other two. Other people’s papers. Other people’s papers that you are trying to beat to the punch. Old papers that you want to get a handle on, but seem like you never will have the time to. Future papers that are pending. Papers that are pending, but appear dead. Trying to revive dead papers.

The experiment. The results. The meaning of experiment and the experiment’s results. Follow-up experiments. Comprehensive validation experiments for the results. The code that underlies it all. Waiting on that code to run. Making that code faster. New experiments. Novel extensions to the experiments. Writing, summarizing and explaining the experiments. The theory of the experiment. Writing the paper about the experiments. Rewriting. Proof-reading. Going through 10 drafts of the same paper until you are sick of it.

Then there’s the lab. The small bits and pieces of mundane lab life that you involve yourself in. Maintaining things within the lab that at some point you became responsible for. Remembering tiny nuggets of related information that somehow only you became privy to. Retaining and producing them at the opportune moment.

At some point, you go back home.

You bask in not having to think of things such as papers and experiments. (thanks.. of course.. to a certain Mrs., who is awesome)

(Unless there’s a deadline. In which case, that’s all you think about)

Then you remember all the other things you have to remember.

At some point, the random thought about whether there is a point in the day when you will not look at a screen of some kind. They seem to be everywhere. The computer. The TV. The PSP. The phone. The laptop. Then you shrug and decide you have to live with such wonderings in the world you are in.

Then you try to keep up with what is happening in the world around. In different spheres of the world around you. In your own personal world. In your interests.

Then you go to bed. Planning what to do the next day. Trying to note down things you remember you have not done that day.

You try to get up the next day, full of zest and life, completely not drained at all.